I liked it... until it died

I bought this car in the early autumn of 1998 for $1600. It had 108k on it. I had it for nearly three years. It had rust along the bottoms of the doors that got noticeably worse during the time I owned it.

I loved how comfortable this car was to sit in and drive. The soft, velour bench seats in those 1980s Buicks were much more comfortable than the bucket seats in modern cars. It was like sitting on a couch. It was great. Bucket seats are really comfortable only if they fit your body perfectly, and guess what? People come in lots of different shapes and sizes. I wish you could get modern cars with 1980s-style bench seats, with the fold-down 60-40 armrest.

I thought it was a nice looking car, too. Stylish in an understated way. If the doors hadn't been rusting out I would have been a lot more upset when it died.

I also liked the fact that it had manual windows and door locks. Less spaghetti wiring to give headaches.

It died with 140,000 miles on it in June of 2001, while I was driving with relatives between Chicago and Ann Arbor. It died at 12:30am, several miles from a freeway exit, on I-94, in the middle of Michigan, somewhere east of Kalamazoo. Readers may detect a certain amount of annoyance in my tone.

What killed it was a blown head gasket. The annoying thing was that none of the "idiot lights" went on until the damage was done. There was a noise, a kind of groaning noise when the engine was under heavy acceleration, that had gradually been getting louder over the previous few months. No computer codes, no warning lights, and a mechanic who checked things out said everything was fine. He didn't do a leakdown test or he would have known it wasn't fine. I didn't know enough back then to ask for one.

On the night in question, the noise suddenly got very loud and the engine suddenly started going "bang bang bang bang" and so on. NOW the lights came on: check engine soon, temp, oil. Thanks, guys, but it's a bit late for that now. I pulled over, shut it off, and that was the end of that car.

In sum, the overworked 2.5 liter 4, combined with idiot lights that didn't provide any warning, added up to the car's demise. It's too bad, because I would have replaced the head gasket and kept the car on the road.

The car taught me some valuable lessons, though. Never buy a car without a tachometer and a temperature gauge. If you've got questions about the state of the engine, get a leakdown test. And AAA can actually come in handy.